Letter From the Editors

The city of Derbent, Dagestan, claims to be Russia’s oldest city. A Caspian market town that once connected the Persian Empire to the diverse settlements of the North Caucasus, it traditionally enjoys a reputation for religious and ethnic pluralism. It is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, which has persisted even in the face of recent aggression like the riots last year. In a local monument to interreligious brotherhood, Orthodox Father Nikolai looks out alongside a rabbi and an imam.

This last fact was recalled by a local after the priest was murdered during services on June 23 during terrorist attacks on churches, synagogues and security infrastructure by a new ISIS affiliate group that killed dozens in Makhachkala and Derbent. Any such crime beggars belief, but one detail of its organization captured the public’s attention.

“The fact that three of the six terrorists were close relatives of the head of one of the local governments allows us to assert that they apparently may have carried out this training, as well as the acquisition of foreign automatic weapons, with complete impunity, without fear of close attention from Dagestani law-enforcement agencies,” analyst Andrei Serenko noted. United Russia immediately expelled the official, who reports say was subsequently detained. But why would privileged and connected young men get involved with ISIS in the first place?

Alisa Ganieva’s novel “Bride and Groom,” alongside the ongoing issues of spontaneous religious violence, official abuses and corruption in Dagestan, featured a new evil for the republic, represented by the female protagonist’s suitor Timur. A youth activist supported by the Kremlin, he was ham-handedly trying to supplant the Islamist guerrillas by promoting the Kadyrovite model of totalitarian Islamo-Putinism. We may be seeing the evolution of such young men toward a less controllable ideology.

A fourth terrorist was the former leader of A Just Russia in the same district as the official, and he was posthumously expelled from his party. A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov made a point of commenting on the incident in detail and calling for reinstatement of the death penalty.

Mironov has been especially active recently, touring regions federation-wide and “is proposing only populist measures,” Darya Garmonenko reports. Expert Aleksei Mukin told Garmonenko that Mironov’s “overarching goal is to remind people in the presidential administration that he is still a major political figure” and save his party by gaining ballot endorsements from United Russia officials.

A Just Russia occupies an awkward spot on Russia’s political map. Mironov positioned the party early on as ultramilitant on Ukraine, but this put him dangerously close to the “angry patriot” movement ahead of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed revolt. According to retired FSB Gen. Yevgeny Savostyanov, the mutiny exposed the true weakness of the Russian president: “We saw that Putin had absolutely no support, [and] Prigozhin’s ‘march’ showed that no one had come out in support of Putin.”

This loss of active support and legitimacy has nourished a whole nest of vipers in a way most modern states have escaped, Savostyanov continues: “We could talk about various things in various areas, but institutionally, he took Russia back to the late 18th century, establishing practically an absolutist regime.”

Russia in the 18th century was notorious for palace coups and mutinous revolts. Dagestan, however, may be doing worse than it was back then. Even in the rather bleak view of the modern North Caucasus in Ganieva’s work, there persists an image of the intercommunal harmony that once existed, the mystical “Mountain of Celebrations” uniting peoples and generations in a great wedding feast.

Most Dagestanis, it seems, still share these sentiments. As one local commented to Novaya gazeta Europe, “Multiple religions have coexisted peacefully here for centuries.” Mufti of Dagestan Akhman Abdulayev defiantly noted that “Radicals want to do their best to turn us against each other and burn down interfaith bridges. But they will not succeed. We have faithfully preserved the traditions of peace from time immemorial.”